← Back to all work
Commercial / Architectural Visualization — 2010 · Standard Chartered Bank

Stanchart HQ

The tower at dusk from a busy Accra corner: a slender all-glass office block whose facade is folded into large diagonal facets, with a tall curving void cut up the centre exposing stacked floor plates lit warm from within. A low podium band in green and blue carries the Standard Chartered wordmark and logo at street level. The dark soffit of a flyover crosses the top-left of the frame, a street lamp flares at the right, and long-exposure light trails from the traffic sweep red and white across the road in the foreground.

Three street-level visualizations of the proposed Standard Chartered Bank head office in Accra: a slender tower of folded glass with a curving void cut up its centre, designed and modelled by Vista and rendered by the studio against a busy junction.

The commission runs across two posts. On 6 August 2010 the studio published COMING SOON THIS AUGUST — STANCHART HEAD OFFICE, MEANWHILE THIS IS THE WIP, describing “a proposal for the design of the Standard Chartered Bank head office for Ghana” and saying plainly that the work was not yet done. The finished set arrived on 8 February 2011 as STANCHART HQ, with the design credited to Vista — an Accra architectural practice that also built the model — and the visualization to R.D+V.S, made in SketchUp, V-Ray and Photoshop. This record keeps 2010 as the project’s year, the year it was commissioned and first shown.

The tower is a slender, all-glass slab whose facade is folded rather than flat. Large angled panels tilt across the curtain wall so the glazing reads as a single creased surface, and a tall void curves up the centre of the elevation, opening the stack of floor plates to view and giving the block its silhouette. At street level a low podium band in the bank’s green and blue carries the Standard Chartered wordmark and logo, so the branch stays legible at the base while the offices rise behind it.

All three frames are taken from the same corner, under the approach of a flyover whose dark soffit cuts the top-left of each image, and all three keep the same foreground of moving traffic, curved guardrail and a roadside billboard advertising motor insurance to SCB account holders. Two are daylight studies: a wide view that shows how the tower sits among its trees, and a tighter vertical crop that reads the fold and the central void. The third is the showpiece — the same corner at dusk, office floors lit from within, and long-exposure light trails swept across the road in red and white.

Each frame is signed with the studio’s the SEED. V.1.1 / 2010 series mark, www.rdvstudiosgh.com and the Revival Design + VFX Studios logo. The uploads are named 9_3, 9_4 and 13_2, so the published set is drawn from a longer working series. Both posts are on blogspot, the 2010 work in progress and the 2011 finished set.

The tower at dusk from a busy Accra corner: a slender all-glass office block whose facade is folded into large diagonal facets, with a tall curving void cut up the centre exposing stacked floor plates lit warm from within. A low podium band in green and blue carries the Standard Chartered wordmark and logo at street level. The dark soffit of a flyover crosses the top-left of the frame, a street lamp flares at the right, and long-exposure light trails from the traffic sweep red and white across the road in the foreground.
The same corner in daylight, seen wider: the folded glass tower rises against a pale sky, its angled curtain-wall facets catching the light and the curving central void reading as a notch of exposed floor plates. Mature trees flank the block on both sides, the green-and-blue podium and bank signage sit at its base, and in the foreground a curved guardrail guides a pickup and a white-and-orange station wagon around the junction, with a billboard advertising motor insurance to SCB account holders at the left and the flyover’s underside cutting the top-left corner.
A tighter, vertical daylight crop of the tower, dominated by the folded glass: the angled facets and the tall curving void up the centre fill most of the frame, with the green-and-blue podium and the bank’s logo band low at the base. A street lamp curves in front of the glazing, trees close both edges, and a white van, a pickup and the white-and-orange station wagon pass along the road in the foreground.